is oganizing things by tag the best we can do?

Webweaving
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I’ve been using some very basic tagging to organize posts on my website, but I don’t really feel like they are as useful as they could be. Clicking a tag and being taken to a flat list of posts that share that tag seems like it be slightly more useful.

I am trying to think about some ways to make tags more useful, and also provide additional ways to get around and find related material on my website. I’d love to hear some of your ideas and anything that has worked for you!

Some things I would like to try:

  • Showing backlinks. I’d like to have a post show a list of other pages on the site that link to it.
  • Weighted tags. Some tags are more relevant than others! It might be nice to display a tag list in an ordered way, maybe also styling the “more important” tags a little differently than the more mundane tags. Some people do “categories” in addition to tags - maybe that is also worth doing.
  • Show connections between pages visually. Showing connections between pages and backlinks could be helpful possibly, but could also be a lot of work. This is very likely not anywhere near out of the box behavior for many static site generators.
  • Adding search. A search box might be nice! Pagefind seems pretty well regarded.
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I think we’ve been making do with categories and tags because they’re easy to build algorithms around. If you’re using blogging software like WordPress and you’ve got all your posts tagged, it’s dead simple for WordPress to index posts by tags. There are other ways to arrange posts, but doing so programmatically might be more complicated.

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hmm… the best I have done is sort and positive/negative tag filter, with starred posts or high ratings being optionally floated to the top. If you added search, you could do some kind of javascript title/post match triggered by each keystroke. :thinking2: I have thought of adding it but not high on my list. I wouldn’t know how to do backlinks or connections between pages. ( I am doing neocities so purely html/css/js stack using JSON flatfile database for storing entries ) The connections/backlinks is probably for a more serious mysql databasing structure with queries… could be done with mysql table matching based on IDs? If you can have both tables have an id match over what post they are including

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i believe this is possible with obsidian! i haven’t used it myself but i’ve seen people who use it for digital gardening and build their sites with obsidian the way some people use ssgs? (naturally i don’t remember the links now :facepalm: sorry)

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the ssg for obsidian is quartz

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Lol, this activates my autism. I think tags are the way of the world (and I think categories + tags are chef’s kiss) though for websites, they aren’t always necessary but get more important as content grows.

It’s why I love booru software even though it’s awful. I also think SNS is ‘failing’ due to tag culture dying., When I made my blog script, it was important to me to get tags up and functioning for it (though I don’t use them enough myself.. I haven’t figured out an ideal system)

I think tags combined with categories (or any other thing) on SNS is really good because you can still filter out a lot of content but find specific things in a tag.

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Nested tags would be an option too. For example, posts tagged with #web-dev/css would be displayed on #web-dev’s page and #web-dev/css’s page. A tag page would also list sub-tags. I haven’t implemented such thing yet, though.

In the past, I provided a short definition of tags on their page, but I stopped doing that to increase my SSG’s performance.

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I feel like this works with just combining tags (web dev + css) or using categories.

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Gosh I personally ADORE tags. I feel like you can do so much once the data (tags) is there!

They’re great for filtering to one type of:

  • Topic (Web dev, gardening, y2k)
  • Format (short posts, thoughts, articles, blogs)

Combined with date fields, it can make it really easy to find ‘i think i was really into snails and there was a snail fact in jan/Feb of 2023?’

I grew up on Tumblr’s tagging system, and used it on my art blog to differentiate styles/completeness/characters/fandom.

I think they’re fantastic for making one type of post with tags, and being able to slice many different ways for dynamic galleries or collections of things.

They also provide discoverability if you’ve got them on the post itself. Interested in possums, and you want to read more about other animal related posts? Maybe there’s an animal tag to peruse!

I’ve used tags like bookmarks. To read or to watch lists. Maybe you’re live blogging a TV or movie or book. A similar tag can help collate your posts across time.

Then with the power of personalised sites, the data sorting is there and you can display it any which way if you wanted. Little book covers for each book tag for a personal library. A menagerie page with pictures of animals, that leads to animal fact collections when clicked.

I really love tags :joy:

Though, when you say ‘more useful’, what kind of things would you like or imagine tags to do?

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I’ve been working on this over the past couple of days. I’ve set the following top-level categories: Life, Music, Books, Comics, Media, Gaming, Tech, and Web. Under these, I’ve got granular tags for further organisation. Tags like gigs under music, audiobooks under books, personal under life, etc.

Sometimes music and life can get blurred as a lot of the gig recaps I post I consider life events, but ultimately fall under music at the end of the day

Slow going through all my posts and fixing the category and tags up.

I have this partially working with internal web mentions. I need to go through and send the mentions manually, and I end up with some simple “back linking”.

I’ve got this on my backlog to implement. Seems useful. Have seen a bunch of people implement across their static sites.

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The Rust implementation of pagefind is sweet as long as you’re OK with installing all of the dependencies (rust, cargo, all the packages). Among other things, it plays nice in a makefile or a shell script, so you’re not tied to Node and npm.

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My website is an 11ty project so I’m super deep into Node/NPM already

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Yeah, I’m over here doing things the hard way. But it’s a MEWNIX system, so my cats understand it, too.

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I personally hate tags/categories and refuse to use them. There is nothing wrong with them as a way of organizing data, and I actually do think they are the best we can do (we might read adding other forms of metadata as just tagging things, too).

My issue with them is that I develop the impulse to be as comprehensive with categorizing and tagging as humanly possible. By the end of a stint, I realize that there’s no way to do so, and that there is so much overlap before categories.

My website’s taxonomy (which could be a form of categorization, I guess), just has one catch-all category for blog posts (“musings”), one for fiction, one for essays, another for books, another for movies, etc. Everything stays in its place.

I’m not sure if this is so unusual that you guys will understand the struggle, but I’ve spent so much time on asking the best ways to categorize information. I guess it’s the fundamental issue in library science, and Foucault writes a bit about it in The Order of Things, and there’s a famous passage in there (taking Borges seriously) that I still think about:

This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

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